Ecnerwal wrote:
songbird wrote:

starting
from bulbules it takes two years to get to
decent stalk size.

Well, perhaps.

I bought some Spanish Roja a couple of years back as my mutt garlic was
in a slump. The mutt garlic gets "pregnant stems" where Spanish Roja is
a scape-forming hardneck. Still growing the mutt, but also growing the
new stuff - A more adequate supply overall.

After some casual internet research I opted to leave the scapes be. Some
(quite a few, actually) of the resulting bulbils were about as large as
a clove.

yes, i've had some that are marble sized.
those can grow fairly nice plants the first
season. i've not seen any form a sizeable
head compared to the cloves i use (the largest
can be close to the size of my thumb). mine
are mostly one variety of a hardneck garlic.


The resulting plants are not quite as big as the "from clove"
SRs, but they are pretty good-sized plants for all that. If they make a
uni-clove I'm betting it will be a pretty good-sized one, and I'd not be
surprised if they actually make cloves their first year out in the
field. On the other hand, I don't mind growing some uni-cloves if they
turn out a good size - less peeling per unit of garlic used, so it's no
guarantee of getting replanted if they choose that route ;-)

yep, it's all fair game if i'm cooking and
that's what i've got on hand. i'll even cook
bulbules. when the bulbules first form they
can be eaten without peeling. just as the
bulbs in the ground are still edible when they
are first forming too. just gotta catch them
before they start hardening off the skin layers.
it's not much longer past the first stage of
scape forming.


Some of the smaller SR bulbils went out in the woods. One patch of 25 or
so is doing well, the others are less impressive. That experiment was a
direct result of the surprising success of a clove or bulbil that exited
the porch into deeply shaded pine/myrtle country and came up to make a
respectable volunteer plant, and having way more SR bulbils than I knew
what to do with.

yes, always have tons of bulbules to mess
with. that is why i'm talking about it being
a good source of green onions for cooking because
i've tried to grow green bunching onions here
from seed and had mixed results. and also from
sets (with much better results, but who wants to
pay for sets if you can have about the same return
for free using bulbules?).


Also growing someone's heirloom garlic - I gifted a couple of
seed-quality heads of SR in return [which, I later heard, got pickled -
ugghhh. Different priorities.]

haha, yeah, i gave some large cloves to a friend
to plant in her garden, one of her sisters (she's a
nun) pulled them as weeds this spring. oops.


Thus far it looks pretty similar to the
SR. It was an impressively large head, but I'll find out if that was
nature or nurture at harvest time.

good luck!


I may try a 50% descaping experiment myself - at least one person who
tried it found a reduction in yield on the de-scaped side, and most
found no meaningful difference, which was why I left them last year.

i mostly descape to keep them from falling and
scattering all over the place. there is already
plenty of garlic growing around here. i don't
want it to take over... descaping at least limits
the number of clumps i have to dig up the next
time if i'm trying to control or clear an area
of garlic. as the back spiral garden has shown
it might be a great idea to just fling handfuls
of scapes around if you really want a lot of
garlic, but you'll likely regret that approach
if you decide later you don't need quite that
much any more. it will likely take me several
more years to clear areas of that garden (not
using weed killers, doing it by hand, harvesting
when needed and when weeding that patch). it's
my prime green manure patch. i don't want it
taken over by garlic or weeds. very healthy
out there right now, coming along nicely.

i haven't done a controlled experiment in
descaping (to do one accurately would involve
more space and equipment than i have).

first you would have to weigh the cloves and
figure the moisture content before planting and
then plant them in a numbered grid (to make sure
you are not influencing the results via watering
or fertilizer use or chance circumstances). when
choosing plants to descape you'd have to generate
random numbers and write them down and then only
descape those plants. when harvesting you would
have to keep track of which cloves go with which
numbers. yet you have to keep the numbers apart
from the list of which you descaped (so you could
not off chance bias the results). and then at final
weighing you'd have to figure out the moisture
content again. how much chaff/skin is left on
the cloves could influence fine results. so i
think very few people have actually done a very
well controlled study.

my own observations is that it can make an improvement.
i think it needs to be done fairly quickly when the
scape first appears and not done later after the plant
has spent a lot of energy forming the scapes. this could
be another variable to test in a controlled experiment.

so far the only real controlled experiment i was
able to do was testing spacing between plants and
from that i've found that four inches is too close
but six is ok. this season i've planted some on an
even larger spacing and they seem to be doing fine,
but i don't think it will make that much difference
in head size.

the interplanted experiment is ongoing, as long as
the plants are not completely covered they seem to
be growing just fine. the head size looks to be
related to how much it is smothered, but other factors
(water, nutrients) can influence that just as much in
the end. still for some areas i trim back the
cover crop and others i let go. we'll see how the
heads look when i pull them.


songbird